Surviving Edged Weapons (1988)

Director: Dennis Anderson

Screenplay: John W. Randle

Cast: Mickey Dawes; Leo T. Gaje Jr.; Dean Gilmore; Kathleen A. Handal; Robert Henke; Dan Inosanto; Gary Klugiewicz; Jan Lewis; Richard Menzel; Kevin Parsons; James Phillips; Ronald Rolland as the Narrator

Obscurities, Oddities and One-Offs

It has been such a long time waiting to see Surviving Edged Weapons which is, yes, an instructional video for the police, produced in Milwaukee in Wisconsin, about the dangers of knife attacks. The reason, however, this film has been slowly developing a little cult, even deserving an even wider access, is that if you have to point to an instructional video to represent this medium, there's nothing else quite like Surviving Edged Weapons in existence. Over a feature length it has real emotionally sobering honesty about the harm knives can cause, including real images I have to warn of before anyone goes watching the film, eighties USA hysteria over crime, and pure madness. Never, dear reader, would you think an instructional video on knife injury would begin in prehistoric time with cavemen (actors in costume and fake wigs) shanking each other. Yes, you still take this subject seriously, the film not shying away from the trauma and injury the police officer testimonies talk of, but the director and production had ambition, and literally through the Dawn of humankind, with Leonard Nimoy approved voice over, to no budget action film set pieces they keep the viewer on the edge of their seats in the bizarre content on display.

Because of these details, and those yet talked of, the experience is complex in watching Surviving Edged Weapons, difficult at times to sit through due to its content. Suffice to say, all the real material can be gruesome (close ups of real wounds including of the dead), shocking (real footage of an Asian country where a man slashes multiple people at a crowd gathering), dumbfounding (a fork managing to be shoved DEEP into a chest), and sad (the testimonies, especially the last which ends the film with a male police officer in tears). Where the infamy comes is in the recreations, between director Dennis Anderson having clear ambitions of spectacle and some utterly nonsensical creative choices. In anticipating the unexpected, this envisions a cop knocking on a door with a warrant only for the disturbed home owner to be sat dishevelled on a chair with a broadsword near the door, one which does get used. A knife blade is attached to a petrol tank cap and razors are suggested as being attached to baseball caps as if a common threat. In the section later on teaching you how to scan and monitor an environment for danger with an acronym, the film of all things has cops bursting in on a woman conducting a Satanic ritual, Iron Maiden poster on the wall to add to the eighties paranoia with Satanic panic, as if it's a normal trial for the American police at the time.

Even when the hypothesized scenes aren't as out there, there are many details to consider. The director clearly wanted to make crime films one day, even on an instructional video budget trying here, so even if it's tentatively about the virtue of keeping cover, the film spices this important message by depicting it through cops raiding a drug bust straight out of a straight-to-video action movie. Some of this material, mind, is legitimately fascinating - moments like how, if a police officer is severely wounded, they control the situation and help themselves through stab wounds - but other times you bask in the rich Milwaukee accents, and witness the over-the-top-scenarios and moments of pure cheese.

From https://assets.mubi.com/images/film/
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Obviously, as an instructional video, the notion of "entertainment" is very subjective. It is informative, if visibly laced in scare tactics - in this world, many people carry more than one knife on their person at all times, or have a broadsword, or in the most abrupt wig splitting scene possible, a butch muscle guy can appear at a domestic dispute with a cleaver abruptly. The film extrapolates various ridiculous if still nasty looking improvised weapons, even in a driving license. Hysteria is felt, from the abrupt satanic ritual to how prevalent knives as a dangerous weapon can be. Yet the point of an instruction film like this is to protect its officers and it gets into some legitimately poignant ideas. Complacency, putting yourself at risk as an officer by not fully checking a bystander or preventing someone getting a drop on you, is a very big and significant aspect of the film it deserves praise for emphasising.

Whilst the scene can be comical, the various versions of a stabbing where the distance between an officer and a criminal is constantly increased, until the point an officer can safely unsheathe their gun and prevent themselves from being stabbed, is interesting to watch¹ as the film, for all its farce, does talk about the messiness of a real fight, and depicts it, in a way for more realistic and of importance to depict than any action film. (Horror as well as, including a shot of horror VHS tapes like Halloween (1978), rather than going into hysteria over violent films the video instead refutes the idea of the stereotypical way a knife if used in slasher films, front downward stabs, in favour of real life blade related violence being chaotic and liable to slash and attack any part of a bystander or police officer's body). It's also important in emphasising how dangerous merely an inch of a sharpened object can be, even an improvised blade in context able to main and even kill someone if an individual isn't prepared. We may find it funny during a scene that someone caught speeding threatens an officer in full thick Wisconsin accent, but it is apt to recognise anyone might argue back in such a situation, wave (as this person does) as something as tiny as the blade on a Swiss Army Knife, and have to be dealt with safely. Said actor, who plays various other roles, also relates the real incident where his face was splayed open by a knife as was "flapping in the wind", requiring surgery as a result; even if his out-of-blue exclamation of such events being "all over sports fans" is colourful he utters it with full sincerity directly to the camera as someone speaking from true trauma.

And I feel that avoids the potentially gross offense to view Surviving Edged Weapons ironically. Its moments where real death or injury are depicted, like a more morally conscious Faces of Death (1978), are uncomfortable, revulsion found in some of the weapons improvised like the fork mentioned paragraphs earlier, whilst the scene of a real incident at an Asian public event is used for emphasis, within seconds, in how multiple people can be harmed immediately if someone is allowed to attack without being prevented to. There is a sense, uncomfortably timed, of how I have watched Surviving Edged Weapons in the midst of a huge increase in knife crimes within England in the late 2010s, especially among teenagers with many tragic deaths. I will not trivialise this concern, that has been talked of in media and even had Donald Trump tweet about it, but considering how serious the film takes its subject, it does feels like a sobering reminder that, whilst there is humour and dated material here, the instructional video feels prescient in the need for its existence, even a version to exist for teaching the public nowadays.

The reason we can laugh is that, with knowledge director Dennis Anderson and everyone on board the production was creating an arguably noble and morally righteous work, everyone involved should be thanked for this work regardless. We can laugh because, separate from the serious material which is treated seriously, they made a film which starts with cavemen; that it has abrupt cameos of Satanists; that it has unintentional comical exaggeration; it has men running at officers with machetes or the narrator blankly mentioning the term of a "martial arts yell". Even the real life examples, like a man throwing pieces of glass at officers off his room, with knowledge no one was harmed, show the absurdity that can take place in these incidents but unlike the fictitious ones come as a reminder of how the unpredictable can happen and should be prepared for. So, yes, entertainment is here but so is an informative document, a historical object of real interest, and a sombre rumination of these issues. The emotions will vary violently throughout as a result, but it becomes better as a result.

From https://i.imgur.com/y97jsaPh.jpg

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1) This "21 foot rule", which is part of what is called the Tueller Drill, teaches an individual to recognize and react to an approaching threat crossing a set distance of 21 feet. It's to be debated but, having been the influence for the video to include this as a major sequence, it's a rule which (in its various interpretations) is of great interest as an outsider to law enforcement to learn of especially as its be apparent subject to debate too. Even if there are many variables which could undermine the specific nature of the rules, its point to also influence a person's judgement and reaction time to a threat is still a credit to its existence. Teaching about "situational awareness", its importance for helping American law enforcement in protecting itself is of interest, and probably would be of benefit, modified, for a bystander to protect himself or herself from such a threat. Hell, if Mythbusters effectively tackled this rule when they tackled the famous phrase "never bring a knife to a gun fight", ideas to ask about how to safely deal with a threat carrying a knife will be worth discussing even if with many revisions.